→ October 25, 2011
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Poodle Springs.

I’m generally not a fan of continuations or parallel novels where one author attempts to complete or extend the work of another. Very few such works earn any kind of critical acclaim; I think Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that tells the story of Rochester’s first wife before madness overtakes her, is the only one I’ve read that is considered a strong work of literature in its own right, and it was more a work of social criticism than a narrative.

Continuations are, in my view, tougher than “authorized” sequels or prequels, because they stitch together two different prose styles and require the second writer to guess at the intended direction of the first – or to ignore it altogether. I’ve read the most popular continuation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon* and found it utterly lifeless; where even a bad Austen novel has its memorable moments, usually humorous ones, all I recall of the completed Sanditon is a lot of walking around on the rocks.

*It’s funny how often these final, unfinished novels are proclaimed by fans of the authors in question as potentially the authors’ best work; you’ll certainly hear how Sanditon, which Austen abandoned after eleven chapters due to ill health, signaled a new direction for her writing, blah blah blah – just look at the unsourced praise in the Wikipedia entry on the book. This is nearly always wishful thinking on the part of fans, combined with the fact that a fragment of a novel is miles away from a completed book.

This is the long way of telling you that I entered Poodle Springs, in which Robert Parker (creator of the Spenser character) starts with the four short chapters left behind by Raymond Chandler and builds a Philip Marlowe novel on that scant foundation, with some skepticism. Chandler is, in my view, a prose master (although novelist Martin Amis would disagree), and his style is often imitated but never matched. Take the sparse, clipped phrasings of Hammett and add some of the greatest similes ever put to paper and you might build a reasonable fake, but Chandler’s writing remains unique in this or any genre. I gave Poodle Springs a fair shake, but at the end of the day it is just a nice detective novel, nowhere close to any of the five Marlowe books I’ve read.

Chandler’s four chapters include a shocking opener – Marlowe is married to Linda Loring, who first appeared in The Long Goodbye
 and seems as ill-fitting a wife for the loner detective as any candidate. They’ve moved to a tony California hamlet called Poodle Springs, but Marlowe insists on earning his own living rather than becoming a kept man for his wealthy bride. He’s approached by the proprietor of a local casino of dubious legality, at which point Parker takes over. He wisely dispenses with the Loring subplot (if we can even call it that) for much of the book and focuses instead on the crime story, one that has the typical hallmarks of hard-boiled detective fiction (small number of characters in a tangled web) but with a leering crudeness that is horribly out of place in a Marlowe novel, and prose that simply can’t match the master’s:

There was a big clock shaped like a banjo on the wall back of the receptionist. It ticked so softly it took me a while to hear it. Occasionally the phone made a soft murmur and the receptionist said brightly, “Triton Agency, good afternoon.” While I was there she said it maybe 40 times, without variation. My cigarette was down to the stub. I put it out in the ashtray and arched my back, and while I was arching it in came Sondra Lee. She was wearing a little yellow dress and a big yellow hat. She didn’t recognize me, even when I stood up and said, “Miss Lee.”

That’s a lot of words without telling us anything at all. The waiting room in question has no relevance in the story. Chandler doesn’t normally waste the reader’s time like that, nor does prose ever have that choppy sound like ever period is an obstacle you hit at full speed. Parker occasionally hits with a good metaphor – “Hollywood Boulevard looked like it always did in the morning, like a hooker with her make-up off” – although even that one would never have come out of Chandler’s pen.

Parker’s plot revolves around a bigamist, some nude pictures, and a few people with behavioral issues, standard stuff for this sort of novel, but his obsession with sex borders on the puerile, at least compared to the subtle approach of Chandler, where sex is always under the surface but never out in the open. An exhibitionist wife bares all to Marlowe – who passes because he’s married, so really, what was the point of this? – and we get too much about Marlowe in the boudoir with Linda when she’s not involved in the plot at all, including a tacked-on ending that feels like a nod to Chandler’s stillborn introduction.

Which gets back to the fundamental problem with Poodle Springs: It seems likely that Chandler never intended to finish this book. Marlowe probably shouldn’t be married, and certainly shouldn’t be married to Linda Loring. Perhaps these four chapters were just Chandler exploring an idea; perhaps he realized it wasn’t going to work. Perhaps it was his own depression after the death of his wife Cissy that led him to put Marlowe into a marriage. (He only finished one novel after her death, Playback, which I haven’t read but which seems to be considered his worst completed work.) The continuation of Poodle Springs was a commercial success, but the positive reviews of the time that claim that “you can’t see the seam where Chandler stopped and Parker picked up the pen” are an insult to fans of the master’s work.

Next up: A Finnish novel, Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, currently on sale through that link for $5.60.

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→ October 24, 2011
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Vile Bodies.

Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies is probably the funniest of the seven novels of his that I’ve read, and certainly the most cynical. Vile Bodies is about upper-class twits in London who aren’t so much vile as venal, often witless, definitely oblivious, living up the good life in the 1920s without apparent purpose or direction other than to get drunk (preferably on someone else’s dime) and have fun.

If there’s a central character at all in this deliberately disjointed novel, it’s Adam Fenwick-Symes, who wants to marry Nina Blount but has no money and, when he does manage to get a hold of some, can’t seem to keep it for very long. Nina’s father has money but is dotty and never seems to recognize Adam from one visit to the next. Adam and Nina travel in a group of friends who encounter Lady Metroland (the madam Margot from Decline and Fall), a strange missionary (parodying Aimee Semple McPherson) and her “angels” who disappear from the novel without much explanation midway through, and a rural auto race of uncommon violence.

Waugh’s most obvious targets are the idle, amoral young rich of the book’s era, but he reserves some of his ire for others, including the idle, amoral old rich, the British government, and the tabloids. Three separate characters fill a role as gossip columnist (“Mr. Chatterbox”) for one of the Fleet Street papers, and all three discharge their duties by fabricating rumors and, in Adam’s case when he’s Mr. Chatterbox, fabricating characters entirely while trying to set off new trends in London fashion. (One is reminded of our current battles over “the narrative” in the highly random world of professional sports.) Every satirical depiction and passage lies on Waugh’s own disdain for the venal nature of his targets: Everyone lies, everyone can be bought, everyone is only out for himself. Even Adam, apparently motivated by love, can’t pass up an opportunity to make more money even if it puts his engagement to Nina at risk. Nina, meanwhile, drops Adam for a man she doesn’t love who has money. Another character, who also disappears midstream, is married off by her rich parents because it’s a “suitable” match over her objections that she can’t stand the man.

Institutions are just as venal as individuals in Vile Bodies. This is spoken by Miles Malpractice, the third character in the book to serve as gossip columnist, visiting Agatha Runcible in a convalescent home after she got drunk and smashed up a racecar she shouldn’t have been driving even when sober:

”Agatha, Adam, my dears. The time I’ve had trying to get in. I can’t tell you how bogus they were downstairs. First I said I was Lord Chasm, and that wasn’t any good; and I said I was one of the doctors; and that wasn’t any good; and I said I was your young man, and that wasn’t any good; and I said I was a gossip writer, and they let me up at once and said I wasn’t to excite you, but would I put a piece in my paper about their nursing home.”

Hey, as long as we get something out of it, feel free to put the patient’s life at risk.

Waugh’s novel proved prescient in some ways, such as the clouds of war putting an end to the gay times of the book, and the tendency of economic boom times to spawn legions of wealthy twits doing twitty things. (Think of all of the famous-for-being-famous “celebrities” of the last dozen years.) And prose this biting – “The truth is that like so many people of their age and class, Adam and Nina were suffering from being sophisticated about sex before they were at all widely experienced” – is my favorite kind of literary humor. But timely satire such as this relies on knowledge of the real-life targets for maximum effect, something few readers today, especially outside of England, are likely to bring to the book. The aspects of Vile Bodies that worked for me were the timeless ones, direct hits to the baser parts of human nature; the silly names and the sendups of politicians, media moguls, and the aforementioned evangelist have lost their power to shock or amuse over time.

The film was later made into a film by Stephen Fry called Bright Young Things, which was Waugh’s original title for the book; the film, available through that link for $4.35 on DVD, had an outstanding cast but garnered mixed reviews from critics who had already read the book.

Next up: Poodle Springs, a novel begun by Raymond Chandler, who had written just four chapters at his death, and completed by Robert Parker, author of the Spenser novels.

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→ October 18, 2011
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The Good Soldier Švejk.

Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk: and His Fortunes in the World War, ranked #96 on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100 and part of the Bloomsbury 100, is a funny, sprawling, slow-reading, and deeply angry look at the pointlessness of war through the eyes of an anarchist soldier who’d be at home in Project Mayhem yet manages to put on a good face enough to keep himself out of harm’s way.

The novel follows the exploits – although given how little he manages to accomplish, we might better call them inploits, or unploits – of the soldier named Švejk (pronounced something like “schwayk”), who finds himself drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army at the dawn of World War I and acts with a single goal in mind, that of his own survival. Along the way, he’s passed from one half-wit superior officer to another, from power-mad lieutenants to drunken chaplains, gets lost (most likely on purpose) in Bohemia in a section ironically referred to as “Švejk’s anabasis,” gets arrested and nearly hung, and always responds to inquiries by telling the absolute truth, embellished with a ridiculous anecdote of someone Švejk knew in his hometown.

The grand secret of Švejk – the character and the novel – is that absurdity is the only viable strategy in the face of the absurdity of a higher authority. Faced with a war that makes survival unlikely, fought over a cause in which none of the fighters has a personal stake, Švejk chooses to “pretend to be an idiot,” playing the part of a perfect innocent who relives what is, in essence, the same episode over and over and always escaping by disarming and/or exasperating those who wish to send him to certain death on the front lines.

If this sounds a lot like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, then you’ve got the idea. Švejk is not a direct antecedent to Yossarian; the latter’s subversion is explicit, while the former works through simpler and more ostensibly innocent means, like taking a direct order a little too literally. Working as batman to the lieutenant he haunts for much of the book, Švejk fulfills his master’s order for a dog by kidnapping one off the street, only to find that the dog’s owner is the lieutenant’s commanding officer, the insane Colonel Kraus, who peppers his harangues by asking his charges if they know what obvious words like “window” or “hoe” mean. Yossarian engages in more active efforts of sabotage – and has plenty of help from his fellow soldiers – whereas Švejk is a solitary operative attempting not to end a futile war but only to get himself to the next sunrise without getting shot.

(I’ve struggled to find a definitive answer on whether Švejk was a direct influence on Catch-22; Wikipedia – which is never wrong – states that it was, probably based on the claim by Czech writer Arnošt Lustig that Heller told him he couldn’t have written his masterpiece if he hadn’t first read Švejk. That seems to be the only source for this assertion; this 2004 New York Times review of a Švejk play states that Heller “ told various interviewers that Céline and Kafka were his most powerful influences and that Švejk was ”just a funny book,’” while a Vanity Fair article from August gives a non-Švejk origin story for Catch-22. I could see a truth in between the two extremes, where Heller, having read the book, was influenced by it on a subconscious level, drawing inspiration from its hero’s response to the war’s absurdity but never returning to the earlier novel in his writing process or alluding to it directly in the text.)

The Good Soldier Švejk is tough to read, even with its humor, for two reasons. One is the translation by Cecil Parrott that has earned criticism for excessively literal, “unimaginative” translations of words and phrases, leaving speech sounded stilted and losing the humor of the original Czech text (that’s the critic’s opinion, not mine). Slavic texts are often tough to read because the sentence structure in those languages differs from ours and because the literary style, especially in the 19th century and early 20th, tended toward long, ponderous passages. The other drawback is that the book is, by design, repetitive. War is stupid, monotonous, and produces entirely foreseeable results. I can’t blame Hašek for making that point through the circular plot, but the feeling that we’re not really going anywhere – combined with the knowledge that the novel is unfinished, so we can’t even get where we might have been going – made my forward progress slow.

Unrelated to any of the above, Hašek talks a lot about food, including jitrnice (a type of Czech liverwurst), goulash, and kolache (a fruit-filled pastry found in parts of Texas where Czech immigrants settled). I was most struck by Hašek’s description of how the insatiable soldier Baloun describes a dish he remembers from back home:

‘You know, at home in Kašperské Hory we make a sort of small dumplings out of raw potatoes. We boil them, dip them in egg and roll them well in breadcrumbs. After that we fry them with bacon.’ He pronounced the last word in a mysteriously solemn tone.

Shouldn’t we always pronounce “bacon” in a mysteriously solemn tone?

Next up: Evelyn Waugh’s biting comic novel Vile Bodies.

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→ October 8, 2011
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Phoenix eats, part 10.

First Arizona Fall League update of 2011 is up for Insiders, leading off with Anthony Gose.

When we first moved to Arizona last year, I grabbed a copy of Phoenix Magazine‘s September issue, which included their annual list of the best new restaurants in the Valley – an impulse purchase that led us to three of our favorite restaurants in the area, The Hillside Spot, Culinary Dropout, and ‘Pomo Pizzeria. This year’s list is now online (although I picked up the paper copy a month ago) and I’ve hit three of the 23 restaurants on their list, including one knockout, the upscale Thai restaurant Soi4.

Located in the Gainey shopping plaza in central Scottsdale, at the intersection of Scottsdale Road and Doubletree Ranch (which becomes Via de Ventura, so it’s close to the Salt River stadium), Soi4 is Thai cuisine, updating classic Thai dishes with modern twists in a trendy Scottsdale atmosphere (if you live around here, you know the positives and negatives in that phrase). Soi4’s take on panang neur uses perfectly-braised short ribs in place of more typical, inexpensive cuts like rump steak. The ribs come with a mixture of chopped red and green bell peppers and cucumbers with a slightly spicy red curry/coconut milk sauce with thai basil. The only better-cooked short ribs I have ever had were at Tom Colicchio’s craftsteak in Las Vegas (twice), and that’s a restaurant that specializes in beef – and costs about three times as much. For an appetizer, I tried their kao pode tod, spiced corn fritters served with a cucumber relish and a spicy clear sauce for drizzling, another traditional Thai dish taken up several notches with stunning presentation, almost a work of art on the plate, with crisp exteriors, bright centers of mostly corn with some minced lemongrass, and no sign of grease or oil on the plate. It’s a little more expensive than your typical Thai place – those two items and a pot of hot tea (bonus points for loose leaf) came to $24 before tip – but absolutely justifies the cost through freshness of ingredients and the masterful preparations.

The Arrogant Butcher, a short walk west of Chase Field, was more middle of the road on my visit, solid food marred by a single kitchen error. It’s yet another outpost from Fox Restaurant Concepts, the people behind Culinary Dropout and Zinburger, this time focused primarily on meats, including charcuterie and slow-cooked meat dishes like the short rib stew I tried on my one visit. The stew was hearty and filling, with small (maybe one-inch) chunks of short rib and red beans, served with a fried egg on top and a rich corn muffin on the side. But the stew contained a large piece of connective tissue – I can’t think of the last time I was in a decent restaurant and had to spit out a piece of food, but this was unchewable and certainly not something I wanted in my stomach. It was just one piece, an oversight by a prep cook, but that undermined the whole meal for me. They offer a strong selection of small sides, including grilled mushrooms, marcona almonds, or the one I tried, roasted red peppers, sliced thinly and tossed in balsamic vinegar.

The third place I’ve tried from that list was Spasso Pizzeria and Mozzarella Bar in Phoenix just off 51, a huge disappointment across the board. The mozzarella is apparently made fresh in house, but for $12, the plate of two cheeses (we also chose scamorza, another cow’s milk cheese that’s dried to produce a harder texture) included just two slices of each plus some very unappetizing-looking, drab/grey roasted vegetables, all unseasoned and undressed. Even the mozzarella itself was unsalted, which is a small crime, and was totally unremarkable in flavor or texture – you can buy equivalent or better fresh mozzarella in any Trader Joes (and there’s one next door!) or Whole Foods. The pizza was entirely ordinary aside from the use of the same fresh mozzarella on top, and everything was inordinately pricey given how inexpensive the ingredients are. Even the crème brulee, which I bought only because my daughter wanted something for dessert, was all wrong, served in a deep ramekin so the ratio of sugar crust to custard was way off. With so many better pizza options in the Valley, I can’t see why anyone would go here and pay more for an inferior product. UPDATE: It appears that Spasso has closed. Can’t say I’m surprised.

That same issue of Phoenix Magazine included a great article on the second act for Chris Bianco, the owner/chef/genius behind Pizzeria Bianco and Pane Bianco. He’s become one of the Southwest’s greatest advocates for local agriculture and biodiversity, an amazing adaptation for a man whose first career, making every pizza by hand, ended abruptly as airborne flour particles worsened his asthma, causing his doctor to give him a “quit or die” warning he had to heed.

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→ October 3, 2011
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Jane Eyre (2011 film).

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is #38 on my ranking of the 100 greatest novels I’ve read, a spot that balances the highly improbable plot against the brilliance of its blend of a gothic horror story, a traditional romance (complete with brooding hero), and a portrayal of a smart, independent female heroine. It is so beloved across the English-speaking world that it has received at least eleven adaptations for the big and small screens, including this spring’s version starring Mia Wasikowska as Jane, combining her brilliant performance with a script that’s faithful to the book’s dialogue and characters but upends its narrative structure to negative effect.

If you haven’t read the novel, you should, but here’s a quick summary. Jane Eyre is orphaned and raised by her cruel aunt, shipped off to a strict Christian boarding school, and eventually hired as governess to another orphaned child, Adele, whose guardian, Edward Rochester (played by Michael Fassbender, whom you might recognize from the bar scene in Inglourious Basterds), is that dark, brooding hero. She and Rochester develop a slow-burning romance even as he hides a terrible secret that will prevent them from marrying – and when that secret is revealed, Jane flees in the middle of the night, eventually finding shelter with a rural missionary, St. John, and his two sisters*. St. John (Jamie Bell, better known as the original Billy Elliott) intends to leave for missionary work in India and proposes that Jane become his wife and join him in his work … but, of course, Jane is not finished with Rochester, regardless of her desire to forget him and their tragedy.

*In the book, it’s revealed that St. John and Jane are, quite improbably, cousins. The film dispenses with this, a reasonable choice even though it makes one of Jane’s eventual decisions seem more generous as a result.

Moira Buffini’s script is incredibly faithful to Brontë’s original words, if not the structure as a whole. Many memorable phrases from the book are preserved here either wholly intact or with minor changes in word order or tense, including its best line, Jane’s question to Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Waskikowska plays Jane as close to her literary counterpart as I could imagine, while Fassbender and Bell both shift their characters one half-step towards the audience – Rochester still broods, but never seethes, while St. John, so austere in the book, shows Jane a quiet affection that one might at a glance mistake for love until Jane calls him out on it. Brontë’s novel gives so much more depth to Jane than to either male character that infusing both with more humanity is actually a welcome interpolation, within the boundaries set by the author but in a way that makes the emotions in the film seem more much real.

Buffini decided, however, that using Brontë’s words she would alter the sequence in which we see the major events: The film begins with Jane’s flight from Thornfield, and has her reliving her story in her mind as St. John and his sisters attempt to restore her to health. The decision to use the hackneyed flashback narrative technique detracted greatly from the film, both up front – where, if you didn’t know the plot, you could easily get lost – and at the end, where the tension of that part of the book is dissipated. In the novel, that last section derives all of its drama and narrative greed from the reader’s desire to see how on earth Jane could be reunited with Rochester after fleeing from Thornfield, disavowing her past, and taking up a quiet life as a village schoolteacher to lower-class girls. Her dull life adds nothing to the tension of the book’s core romance, put asunder by Rochester’s deceit with no apparent way to repair the rift, so it is merely the passage of time, of page after page without progress, that provides any incentive at all to plow through descriptions of her life with St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) and his sisters. But by shifting half of the time spent on this section of the story to the beginning, and just generally cutting down on the screen time committed to it, there’s virtually no tension left – a viewer unfamiliar with the story would have no idea how close Jane comes to committing to go to India, and the reason for her refusal to marry St. John without love appears to be solely that she still loves Rochester, not that she’s an independent woman who is unwilling to sacrifice her principles for social expediency. Minimizing the portions of the book that focus on Jane’s youth and her time with St. John is an understandable move to fit the novel into two hours, but losing the gravity of the decision she makes with regard to the latter is a major blow.

I’m no Oscar prognosticator, but I would throw out there a guess that Wasikowska might earn a Best Actress nomination for her role here, while the film itself should grab a passel of nominations for costumes, lighting, and scenery. There was a very clear determination to make the film look as authentic as possible, including the use of natural light – meaning candlelight or fireplaces for nighttime scenes, enhancing the gothic feel of the film – at all times. It had to make the production more difficult, but the reward for that effort is evidence throughout the movie.

Jane Eyre also saw a longer adaptation in 2006 starring English stage and TV actress Ruth Wilson as Jane and Toby Stephens (son of Dame Maggie Smith) as Rochester. This four-hour miniseries ran on PBS here as the two-part finale of Masterpiece Theatre (now simply known as Masterpiece), hewing much more closely to the book’s plot structure while altering more of its dialogue and even playing a little loose with Jane’s character, modernizing her in a way that seemed out of place in a work set in the 1840s. Despite that, it is beautifully rendered and the script gives a much fuller treatment to the development of Jane’s relationship with Rochester that simply isn’t possibly in the 120 minutes of the 2011 version.

Also, if you’ve read Jane Eyre or seen any of the film adaptations, you must read Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, a hilarious satirical romp that involves a literary detective who has a special relationship of her own with Rochester and is on the case when a madman makes sure Jane doesn’t wake up in the middle of that one fateful night.

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→ September 30, 2011
→ By

Sid Meier’s Pirates! app.

Amazon has the complete Black Adder series on DVD on sale today for $34. I’ve seen a few episodes and, in what should surprise no one, generally laughed at everything Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry did.

Also, recent stuff over at the Four-Letter: Division Series predictions, scouting Jarrod Parker & Kenley Jansen, this week’s Klawchat, and yesterday’s podcast (I come on the show right around the 14 minute mark).

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Sid Meier’s Pirates! was one of the few computer games I played frequently as a kid, so when I saw there was an iOS app version, there wasn’t really a serious chance that I’d pass on it, especially since it was on sale about two weeks ago (it’s back up to $4.99). It’s a pretty faithful adaptation of the original PC game – I never picked up the 2005 remake so I can’t compare them – and I would say I got my money’s worth out of it, but overall found it simple and repetitive, while the difficulty of one small aspect of the game that’s critical to completing it ended up ruining the experience.

In the game, you play a pirate and spend time sailing around the Caribbean, attacking other ships, plundering small cities, looking for buried treasure, and trying to complete a long list of “quests” that serves as the game’s main storyline. But you spend a ton of time just sailing, even with the new “auto-sail” feature that lets you automatically jump from one city to another as long as you’ve previously visited both of them.

The game itself boils down to a few mechanics:

1. Sailing. This is boring, and once you figure out the ideal way to sail with your ship type, there’s no thinking involved.
2. Fighting ship to ship. Great if you have a fast ship, less so if you have a larger fighter and just need to ram the other ship and engage in sword-fighting.
3. Bombarding a city. This was the most fun for me because you never get a break of more than a few seconds, and have to combine speed and precision while trying not to overuse your artillery, which can leave you defenseless while you reload.
4. Dancing – which is just rhythmic tapping. You can get information by wooing the daughters of the various mayors and governors, but wooing them just means bringing them gifts and dancing well. It’s very silly, and I can’t imagine how this would work for a hearing-impaired player, but if you’re musically inclined at all it’s not that difficult.
5. Sword-fighting – and there is a lot of it. It’s also the one part of the game that just doesn’t work well, but you need to do it to complete the final quest and several of those leading up to it. As your character ages, your sword-fighting ability drops too, making a hard task harder. You swipe a finger across the screen for one of six moves, three attacking and three defending, but I found the app (or the screen) wasn’t responsive enough, so I’d swipe without getting the resulting action on the screen. It’s not a big deal for most of the early fights, because the opponents are so weak, but the closer you get to the end the more critical this becomes.

The game’s central storyline involves you finding four lost relatives who’ve been kidnapped and held in unknown locations around the Caribbean; to find them, you must defeat this one character, Baron Raymondo, sixteen times to get the four pieces of each of the four maps to the characters’ locations. (You may also accidentally come across one of them while landing for some other purpose, which happened to me twice.) There’s no thinking or strategy involved in chasing down Raymondo, and let me suggest that having the player complete the same task sixteen times might be a little over the top.

There are other smaller challenges within the game. Players must recruit crew members and keep them happy through regular plundering and occasional payouts. You can also trade in various goods, although the quantities are small enough that I don’t see how this could be a central part of the game, and can earn huge rewards for finding any of the four lost Indian cities; one of those locations comes from finding your four lost relatives, while the others come from buying certain trinkets that will impress local tribal chiefs, who then will give you parts of the maps … again, no thinking involved, just rote completion of tasks.

And that’s the ultimate problem. A game that I thought was fun when I was 15 because I was happy to just explore the game world and fight some battles seems trite today when I’m looking for more of an intellectual challenge. If the point of the game is just to fight a bunch of battles, then make it shorter so the tasks don’t become monotonous. Otherwise, expand the game world with more cerebral tasks, more character interaction, more purpose to the various smaller settlements that are little more than refueling stops as it stands, anything to give the game some complexity and keep me interested enough to want to play it a second time.

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→ September 29, 2011
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The Kids Are All Right.

The more I think about The Kids Are All Right (currently $6.59 on amazon), a 2010 comedy nominated for Best Picture with every other movie made in Hollywood last year, the more frustrating I find it. It is extremely well-acted, with as many as five strong performances depending on your standards for younger actors, and deliberately uncomfortable almost from the first line of dialogue. Its exploration of the nature of complex long-term relationships by using one we might (wrongly) consider “unusual” and making it look as usual as it should be is insightful and unflinching. And then the whole thing falls flat in the final ten minutes, as if the writers just ran out of steam – or were encouraged to deliver a more traditional ending.

Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) Allgood are a married lesbian couple who have raised two children, 18-year-old Joni and 15-year-old (I think) Laser, each borne by a different mother but from sperm from the same anonymous donor. Laser pushes Joni to call the sperm bank and request to contact the donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a modern-hippie restaurateur who becomes involved in the kids’ lives, much to the chagrin of Nic. Jules, meanwhile, is trying to get a landscape design business for which she seems fairly unqualified off the ground, and agrees to take on Paul as her first client, only to – mild spoiler here – end up sleeping with him. (The scene where they first have sex includes a hilarious nod to the scene in Boogie Nights where Moore’s character first sees Dirk Diggler’s jiggler.) The consequences of that act, while fairly predictable, aren’t fully played out at the end of the film, particularly not for Paul, whose storyline was cut off without a fraction of resolution, a shame for a character that was both central and well-developed, flawed yet sympathetic, often the lens through which we see the Allgoods more clearly.

At first blush, I took the film to be a meditation on the nature of families and how delicate the balance can be even in what otherwise appears to be an emotionally strong family; the fact that the parents are gay is only relevant in that it allows for the sperm-donor plot line, as otherwise the Allgoods are a standard nuclear family. But now I’m wondering if the film is really about Nic, and how destructive her own controlling personality is on her family, especially on Jules and Laser. She crosses the line into overinvolvement in some of her interrogations of her kids (and the third degree she later gives Paul). She uses Jules’ and Paul’s affair as a weapon to drive wedges between Jules and the kids as well as between Paul and the kids, and to reestablish her dominance in her relationship with Jules. In the dinner scene at Paul’s house, she brings the entire conversation to a halt with a seemingly innocent move that is designed to get all eyes on her. Even before the final blowout with Jules, their arguments revolve around her dissatisfaction – and if Jules tries to get a word in about her own complaints, Nic manages to refocus the argument about herself. She might be a narcissist, but even if not she clearly has a driving need to control everything she can in her life, even if that means detracting from the lives of those closest to her.

Bening is off the charts in her performance as Nic – what a year for actresses in starring roles – infusing nearly every scene, even light ones, with the tension that defines her tightly-wound character. Moore was also excellent in her typical up-for-anything role, but I thought Bening’s task was tougher, as Nic is written with strong masculine and feminine sides; she’s the head of household, breadwinner, decision-maker, with boyishly short hair, yet wears makeup (Jules doesn’t), shows more outward emotion, takes more care of her overall appearance … perhaps the character is just overwhelmed by the extent of the role she expects or is expected to fill, and just when she has the balance right, in comes Paul to upset everything. This conflict makes it all the more unsatisfying when the storyline ends so abruptly. A clean, complete resolution would be unrealistic, but there’s an “everything’s going to be fine” vibe to the closing scenes that I didn’t think was set up by anything that came before it.

Ruffalo was affecting in an understated role as the soft-spoken, warm-hearted Paul, living a twenty-year-old’s dream life only to realize through his discovery of an instant family that he doesn’t have the life he really wants. The script easily could have left him as simply a vehicle to expose the fragile structure holding the Allgood family together, but instead he was a fully-formed character who establishes different relationships with each of the four family members. Laser ended up with the least development – although he has one of the better lines when his mothers catch him and a friend watching an adult DVD, a scene that is about as awkward (in a good way) as any realistic movie can get – and his relationship with Paul is also underexplored, especially since he was the one who originally pushed his sister to call the sperm bank.

I can watch and appreciate a tough, complex, uncomfortable movie if there’s a decent payoff at the end – again, not necessarily a clear dénouement wrapped up in a bow, but one where the protagonists are, if not better off, at least materially changed because of the conclusion of the episode they’ve just experienced. The Kids Are All Right does so many things well, but the characters end their story under an illusion that nothing at all has changed. Maybe that’s the point, but for me, it took away from much of the reward of watching the first 90 minutes.

Apropos of nothing, the title of this film has put the Supergrass song “Alright” in my head for the last week.

Next up: The 2011 remake of Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska, who played Joni in this movie, as the title character.

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→ September 26, 2011
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The Soul of a Chef.

Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio remains one of the most essential cookbooks in my kitchen for its reliance on basic formulas rather than completed recipes – the core idea is that once a moderately experienced cook has the underlying ratio of a recipe, s/he can build up or embellish from there on his/her own. But Ruhlman first came to prominence as a food writer for a series of narrative non-fiction books on the American culinary scene as depicted through its chefs; one of those books, The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection, combines three mini-books into one volume that explores three different corners of this world.

Part one takes us through the Certified Master Chef exam, a controversial test that runs participants, most of whom are successful chefs but none of whom (at least in this telling) are celebrities, through the gamut of cuisines with a particular emphasis on French classical cooking; each candidate must pass every part to earn certification, although s/he can fail one section and retake it after the rest of the test is completed. Ruhlman weaves together the individual candidates’ experiences – mostly struggles – with discussions of the food and cuisines covered and some mentions of the disdain held for the exam in parts of the industry. Part two jumps to Michael Symon, at the time a rising star in Ruhlman’s native Cleveland but now a bona fide national celebrity who’s one of the Iron Chefs on Iron Chef America, taking us through a few weeks at his flagship restaurant, Lola, with a window on the beginnings of his emergence on the national food radar. (I’ve been to Lolita, a more casual restaurant Symon opened in Lola’s original space, and was very impressed, but clearly I need to get back to Cleveland to try Lola proper.) Part three is an inside look at Ruhlman’s work with French Laundry chef-owner Thomas Keller on the first of several cookbooks they would write together, probably the section with the least narrative greed but the most interesting food, as Ruhlman gets as far into Keller’s mind as anyone short of Dom Cobb could. (Also interesting was the name of one of the young chefs in Keller’s kitchen: Grant Achatz, today famous for his wildly inventive food at Alinea and for his battle with tongue cancer, about which he wrote in Life, on the Line.) Best of all, The Soul of a Chef concludes with recipes from all three of the primary chefs profiled in the book, including Symon’s signature corn crepes with BBQ duck confit and several of Keller’s best-known dishes from The French Laundry.

Ruhlman’s gift as a food writer is the way he combines strong storytelling with passion for and knowledge of great food. He went through the Culinary Institute of America’s program when writing The Making of a Chef and thus understands the fundamentals of professional cooking but also areas of cuisine now considered esoteric outside of the great restaurants, like forcemeats and terrines or offal, and can make these foods or techniques accessible to the lay reader. He will have you rooting for candidates in the CMC exam, and rooting for Symon to earn his restaurant, successful locally, more national notice that will boost him personally but also the Cleveland restaurant scene as a whole.

If there’s any real weakness to The Soul of a Chef – aside from the proofreading, which, while I am a huge Ruhlman fan, I must admit is not his strength – it’s the lack of any real tie between the three sections. They’re all chefs, they are all dedicated to their craft in a way that straddles the line between admirable and obsessive, and they do sit at three separate places on the scale of culinary celebrity (which I would not conflate with culinary success). But this book read like three non-fiction novellas, three very good ones that told compelling stories (Ruhlman infuses the visit to Lola by an influential national food writer with a ton of tension, almost as much as occurs naturally in the CMC section) and expanded my knowledge and/or understanding of food. I’m not even sure that that disconnect between the three sections is a flaw, but enter this book expecting a collection of very strong essays rather than a single 300-page narrative.

* Ruhlman now has a new cookbook out, called Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto, but I haven’t seen it yet and probably won’t until deeper into the offseason. I’m just now working through Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook, which I bought after seeing it included recipes for everything I’ve had and liked at the restaurants of that name.

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→ September 23, 2011
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The Hour, season one.

I wasn’t aware of the existence of the BBC series The Hour (official site) until I caught Alan Sepinwall’s positive review of it in August, and as a fan of highbrow British drama and of one of the series’ three stars, Dominic West (a.k.a., Jimmy McNulty), added it to the DVR queue. Its combination of suspense, complicated interoffice relationships (romances and rivalries), and subtle jabs at modern Western governments did not disappoint, even when the show didn’t quite deliver the slam-bang finish my American sensibilities anticipated.

“The Hour” is the show within this show, a new BBC newsmagazine program that debuts in 1956, just as the Soviets are about to crush an uprising in Hungary and Colonel Nasser is about to nationalize the Suez Canal. This propitious timing coincides with a more personal intrigue that consumes the program’s chief reporter, Freddie (Ben Whishaw), who receives a desperate attempt for help from an old friend, the daughter of the wealthy aristocratic family that took him in during the Blitz. “The Hour” is produced by Bel (Romola Garai), Freddie’s ex-girlfriend and a controversial choice as producer because of her gender, and Freddie finds himself passed over for the anchor’s chair by the ambitious cad Hector (West), who appears to be all style but develops over the six episodes into a man of substance – or a man who wants to have substance but can’t fully commit to it.

Although Hector and Bel end up in the sack – really, if you couldn’t see that coming, I have some bad news about Santa Claus – the relationship between Hector and Freddie is the most fascinating of the show. Freddie is naturally jealous of Hector’s ease with women and affair with Bel, but Hector sees in Freddie an intellectualism and persistence that he wishes he had. Freddie purports to scorn Hector, but on some level desires his respect, not realizing he’s already earned it.

The Hour‘s creators have also done an excellent job of filling out the roster beyond the Big Three with complex characters who work as more than just mere props and set the show up well for future seasons (there’s at least one more in the pipeline). Clarence, Bel’s boss, is the most central of these, a longtime company man who must shield the show from would-be government censors but also has personal motives for his actions, including one revealed in a brief, impassioned speech to Freddie about this show being the opportunity for which he’s worked his entire career. There’s also a ton of groundwork laid for the future in Hector’s marriage to Marnie, whose executive father has been instrumental in advancing Hector’s career. (Marnie is played by Oona Chaplin, whose grandfather, Charlie, appeared in a few films of his own.)

The drama of putting on a weekly news program isn’t in and of itself much with which to sustain a show, so the writers have written most of that into the background, waiting until the final episode to shift it to the front of the plot, at which point it ties together Freddie’s intrigue story, Hector and Bel’s affair, and the threat of censorship into one very tense program, with a plot twist during the live broadcast I truly did not see coming. Instead, the writers relied on the intrigue, the romance, and the discussions of actual events in the Suez and Budapest to keep up the tension in the first five episodes, as well as the tremendous performances by all three of the central actors, particularly Whishaw as the sleep-deprived reporter whose search for the truth encompasses both political and personal ends.

I’ve seen some criticism of the show in the British press that compared it to the American series Mad Men for its setting in a previous era and heavy use of the look and style of that time period, but it reminded me more of a British made-for-TV movie from 1988 called A Very British Coup, in which a populist Labour Party candidate becomes Prime Minister, only to face a wide-ranging conspiracy by entrenched commercial interests to remove him from power. That film, like The Hour, does tension the hard way, through words and characters plotting rather than through the threat of physical harm. It’s a tough trick, and I even found myself falling into the trap in the final episode of season one, when, after the show-within-the-show has concluded, the final piece of the spy puzzle is placed, but quietly, without a weapon or an officer of the law in sight. I find films, TV series, and books written in that way to be very satisfying because I feel more involved in the tension – putting a protagonist at the end of the gun barrel is easy, so easy it’s brutally overused – but I could easily understand someone seeing The Hour‘s dialogue-driven plot as dull for the very same reason. Your mileage may vary.

You can watch The Hour on amazon instant video, but it doesn’t appear to be on Netflix instant streaming yet.

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→ September 20, 2011
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The Wire, season one.

When I finally started watching The Wire in June or so, I didn’t intend to write about it here because I feel like no show of the last ten years has been written about, and written about so well, as this one. Enough of you have asked for my thoughts that I changed my mind, but I’m not sure I can offer you anything new on the subject.

I was a big fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, Wire creator David Simon’s previous show, also based on Baltimore on a nonfiction book Simon wrote, and a show that stood out for the depth of its characterization rather than its use of the crimes themselves as the primary generator of narrative threads. The show made Andre Braugher a minor star – it should have made him a major one, but the show was buried on Friday nights at 10 pm for much of its run and never found the audience it deserved – and did win four Emmy awards over its run, including one for Braugher, so at least it was noticed by the industry if not by the viewing public as a whole. It was also one of the first shows I can remember that used the ensemble cast as a true ensemble; Braugher was the best actor, and the best character, yet was never singled out in the writing as the show’s main star beyond his character’s story arcs. You watched for the group, not just for him.

That casting and writing mentality – that the ensemble is bigger than the sum of its actors – is the great separator, in my mind, between The Wire and just about any other show I’ve seen in any genre. The acting is strong, the dialogue is strong (still stylized, just not as much as your standard formulaic network crime drama), the plotting is intricate, but at the end of the day, it is the idea that the stage that unites all of these players is the true center of the show that makes The Wire such compelling viewing.

For the four or five of you who haven’t seen this series, season one follows an ad hoc task force in the Baltimore city police department as they identify and investigate a large drug-dealing operation in the city’s housing projects that is also responsible for up to a dozen murders. The show gives more or less equal time to the members of that drug cartel, all African-American, running their criminal operation in an efficient, business-like manner, led by Avon Barksdale and his consigliere Stringer Bell. The good guys can be bad, the bad guys have some elements of good, and there is no question where Mr. Simon’s sympathies lie on the twin subjects of the war on drugs and drug decriminalization – but it’s never preachy the way most network shows (I’m looking at you, Law & Order: SVU) are when they try to get topical. Season one of The Wire shows the impact of the war on drugs and lets those results speak for themselves.

You have to dig fairly deep into this show to find poorly drawn or stock characters – over the course of 13 rich episodes, the writers show us multiple sides of at least a dozen central characters, most amusingly Wee-Bey, and show significant development of at least half of those, including cops Pryz (screw-up nepotista to dedicated researcher) and Carver (clock-puncher to hardcore surveillance guy … but with a twist in the final episode of the season) to Barksdale lieutenant and nephew D’Angelo (grows a conscience) to addict/confidential informant Bubs. Yet even those stock characters have their value, such as personal favorite Proposition Joe (whom I quoted in last week’s chat) or Ed McMahon-in-uniform Jay Landsman.

And then there’s Omar Little, whom I think is the show’s most popular character – a violent, ruthless thief who also speaks unusually formally (never swearing), abides strictly by his own set of ethics, and is gay. He only appears in a handful of episodes in this season before absconding, but he’s the best example of the series’ stylized speech – you may never encounter someone who speaks like this, but it is so memorable and so clever that I can forgive the departure from reality.

For my money, though, the star of season one is Stringer Bell, played (to my shock) by an English actor, Idris Elba, now the star of Luther. Bell is a brilliantly conceived character, the brains behind the Barksdale operation, taking economics classes in the evenings, running front businesses as actual businesses, devising codes and changing protocols, and ordering murders when necessary. Elba infuses this character with tremendous gravity between his baritone voice and this one facial expression where he drops his chin without lowering his eyes, delivering a look that could pin a thought in midair and drop it to the ground without a fight. If he’s on the screen, I don’t want to miss a syllable.

Some scattered remaining thoughts from season one:

* Many of you have told me you consider this the best series in TV history, but I haven’t seen anywhere near enough television to offer that judgment. I actually don’t like most scripted TV series; the medium isn’t the problem, but the industry serves the mass audience a product that just doesn’t speak to me. The best TV series I’ve seen isn’t a series by our standards – that would be Foyle’s War, a British detective series that airs in roughly 90-minute self-contained episodes, with just a few per season. It’s more a series of short movies than an American-style TV series. It’s nothing like The Wire in setting, look, feel, time, or place, but it is everything like The Wire in intelligence, wit, and tension.

* So I mentioned the other day that Unforgiven was the only movie for which I can remember walking out of the theater before the film ended, and the scene that did it was when Eastwood’s character (EDIT: I got this wrong – see the comments) kicked the tar out of English Bob, after which we saw Bob’s companion urinate down his own leg. My wife wanted out at that point, and I can’t say I disagreed, even today: The use of someone pissing himself as comic relief is such unbelievably weak writing that I’d be ashamed to laugh at it, and as a demonstration of terror it’s rather over the top. Contrast that with Wallace’s final scene, when he realizes he’s trapped and that the person who ordered the hit isn’t around to countermand the order. He’s done, and he’s shocked, scared, betrayed, and when he loses bladder control, it’s mentioned in passing by Bodie as a way for the writers to heighten the emotion of the scene – not for cheap laughs. That wasn’t the part of the scene that made the strongest impression on me (that would be Poot having to tell Bodie to shut up and pull the trigger, then taking the gun and finishing the job himself, showing how much of Bodie’s tough-guy act was just that, an act), but it is a testament to the strength of the show’s writing.

* Speaking of Andre Braugher, if you haven’t seen his FX series Thief, for which he won his second Emmy for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, the entire six-episode run is available for free on imdb.com. Braugher is the clear star here, but the plotting on The Wire reminds me more of this series than any other I’ve seen.

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